Nutritious After School Snacks: Banana Muffins with Cream Cheese Icing

Thank youTruMoo andDairyPure brand milk for sponsoring this post about nutritious after-school snacks: Banana muffins recipe post! Start and end your day right with milk and chocolate milk!

With three growing kids, we go through a lot of milk in our home. I serve it at every meal, and I don’t have much juice or soda around the house. The kids start the day with a bowl of cereal and milk or a waffle with a side of milk. When they come home from school, they are starving and once in awhile, I like to have a freshly baked snack for them. I have made banana muffins a lot in the past, but I have been experimenting with adding ingredients to make them heartier. I was nervous my kids were going to not like these banana muffins with cream cheese icing since I added a few extra ingredients to boost the nutrition, but they did!

If you have followed my blog for awhile, you know we adore TruMoo milk and really enjoy making recipes with the different flavors. After all, how can you resist Double Chocolate Donuts? Though I was tempted to make another chocolate dessert, I instead decided to make a banana muffin recipe that used DairyPure brand milk. Thus, the delicious cream cheese icing.

The batter starts off pretty standard. However, I also included some ground chia seeds, ground flax seed and apple sauce in placement of the oil/butter for added nutrition. Additionally, I added a few mini chocolate chips for enticement and to complement the banana!

The best way to make even-sized muffins is to use an ice-cream scoop to cleanly and evenly distribute the batter. This recipe yields 16 muffins.

Once they are baked and cooled, you can make the cream-cheese icing. I used lower fat cream cheese and skim DairyPure brand milk. The consistency is less like a frosting and more like an icing that will harden after 20 minutes or so. I added a few mini chocolate chips to the top as well.

This kids loved these muffins, and I never told them about the extra ingredients.

Serving your kids a nutritious snack with a glass of DairyPure brand milk or TruMoo Milk is a great way to boost their energy for homework time.

As a mother, I am confident I am giving my kids the nutrition they need. I also feel reassured that DairyPure brand milk and TruMoo come from your local dairy and each contain no artificial growth hormones,* making them the perfect pair for your children’s diets!

So, be sure to help your kids start and end each day right, with DairyPure brand milk and TruMoo’s perfect balance of nutritious and delicious!

*No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from cows treated with the artificial growth hormone rbST and non-rbST-treated cows.

Banana Muffins with Cream Cheese Icing

Yield: 24 mini muffins

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 22 minutes

Total Time: 32 minutes

Banana Muffins with cream Cheese Icing is a great after school snack for the kids

Ingredients

¾ cup sugar

2 eggs

½ cup applesauce

1 tsp vanilla

4 ripe bananas, mashed

2 cups whole wheat white flour

½ cup chia seeds ground, I used a coffee grinder

½ cup ground Flax Seed

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

¼ cup mini chocolate chips.

Icing

4 oz cream cheese, softened

¼ cup powdered sugar

3-4 tbsp Skim DairyPure brand milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix all the ingredients, except the chips, until well blended. Add the chips and pour into greased muffin pans or into paper liners. Bake for 20 minutes.

For the Icing

In a large bowl, beat cream cheese and powdered sugar until smooth.

Beat in milk and vanilla until well combined.

Spread over cooled banana muffins and let set about 30 mintues. (you can add more chips too)

We love TruMoo chocolate milk at our house. It would be great to have with your muffins too. Our grandchildren come in from school ‘starving’ every day. My daughter makes them warms muffins for snacks on occasion to. It will certainly hold them over until supper much better than chips.